I have successfully passed my first year of doctorate in business administration (DBA), so three more years to go. Looking backward, the experience has been rewarding, demanding, mentally stimulating but not absent of fears and existentialist crisis.

The program started with the module “Research design and philosophy” where I acquired the foundation of academic research paying special attention to the research methods. I wrote the coursework “Research methods in finance” that helped to comprehend the research philosophies with application to finance and to envision the scaffold of my future research around algorithmic trading.

The second module, “Quantitative and qualitative reach”, helped me to formally understand the ins and outs of quantitative and qualitative research, and mixed methods as well. The module assessment, “Evaluation of three algorithmic trading strategies“, helped me to jump-start my futures DBA thesis, defining a structured methodology to evaluate algorithmic trading strategies. For the first time, I used QuntConnect, a quantitative trading platform to evaluate three strategies: buy and hold, volatility risk premium, and sentiment momentum.

The third and last module of the first DBA program, “Literature reviewing for doctoral studies”, provided the foundation of any academic and scientific research, the literature reviewing. For the assessment, I created the work “Literature reviewing for algorithmic trading”, where I read and analyzed, totally or partially more than fifty articles and textbooks related to finance. I structured the coursework in three themes, neoclassical finances with special attention to random walk hypothesis and efficient market hypothesis; behavioral finance and aspects such as, mental counting, heard behavior or emotional gap; and finally algorithmic trading, a long compendium of textbooks organized by programming languages, particularly R, Phyton, MATLAB, and C++. 

At the beginning of the program, professors and academics mentioned that the DBA helps to grow and expand the researcher’s understanding of the research subject. In my case, this has been extraordinary, and only after one year. My naive and candid view of the subject has grown tremendously, now I am aware of the academic research techniques that help me to understand the existing literature; I have defined and exercised the foundation of algorithmic trading, academically and practically; and I have started my first formal literature reviewing of my research interest.

I am really excited about the coming three years, I am sure that I will achieve an understating of trading algorithms with an unprecedented depth and breadth of the subjects’ theme, and not only academically but empirically.

If you have interest to know more about my courseworks, I invite you to visit the section DBA. I hope you like them.

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